


Still Life: Love, Indoors

by King_Latifah



Category: Adastra (Visual Novel)
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:14:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28354509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/King_Latifah/pseuds/King_Latifah
Summary: "Between worlds, galaxies, superclusters—there are so few places where at least one of us will not be considered a novelty. So indoors it is."
Relationships: Marco/Amicus
Comments: 2
Kudos: 22





	Still Life: Love, Indoors

**Author's Note:**

> Enjoy this meaningless set of observations about the life I want to live with the tall himbo wolf man. I love him enough to trudge through the damn post-semester writer's block, and then some; let this and whatever other fics I can manage be an ebenezer to my love for Amicus. (Inspo this time comes from Chopin and Kathryn Harrison's "The Kiss.")

When he visits, if we go out in public—and how can we not, in Rome?—we go at night. The city will never run out of its insomniacs, so we’re never alone, but Amicus allows himself to cut loose on the royal formality and scares anyone brave enough to ogle. He raises his claws and roars. Pretends to be a ghost, a hallucination, an old god. No one can see a seven-foot-tall wolf here without at least snatching a quick double-take; on Adastra, I know I’ll stick out just as much. Between worlds, galaxies, superclusters—there are so few places where at least one of us will not be considered a novelty. So indoors it is, love so freakish and divine it can only be expressed inside a temple of our choosing. (Which is always, as it turns out, my apartment.)

“How long are you here?” I ask, half of my face pressed into his shoulder. We’re on the couch listening to Chopin to get him used to all the human musics he’ll be hearing around the palace when I’m there, for now tranquil wordless sounds the Lingua doesn’t need to worry about. How silly—for centuries we called our love for these sounds _universal_. If there’s one thing humans are good at, it’s making assumptions. 

Amicus looks vaguely uncomfortable. I take that as his answer: he can’t tell me. I groan, less in frustration and more in resignation, the untranslatable sound a man makes when he hears the guillotine blade above him drop. 

“Yes,” he says. “I know.”

For all their supposed benevolence (at least we can see each other, Amicus says, and I guess I can swallow it without putting up too much of a fight), the parents really do hate communication. He’ll show up with a week’s notice and no details of his stay. Just enough stretch drive to make it here and back. I do my best to understand, but really, how can I accept it, crying snotnosed and watching him climb up the fire escape, not knowing when he’ll be returning?

“God, I hate this.”

“Yes,” he says. “I know.” Then he kisses my forehead and I groan again and my hand roves over his gigantic body in silence. We’re united in that we’re together, holding and being held, and in our silent understanding that we as a pair are alone in the universe: for now, our love can only be expressed in silence. 

*

Besides the obvious (yes, every day—neither of us are built for celibacy in our twenty-somethings), there’s plenty to do inside. The crumbling monuments that charm so many tourists don’t necessarily faze an emperor who’s pissed in buildings 10,000 years old. Amicus is fascinated by the funniest things. He spends a slackjawed hour scrolling through Facebook for the first time, though the slang is completely unintelligible to him; he waits excitedly on the balcony, calling me over and laughing when a yellow or purple car passes (a custom-detailed car will pass occasionally covered in glitter or anime girls, and he’ll go nuts); he counts my books over and over and pulls some from the shelves at random to ask, “Have you read this?”

“Skimmed, a little,” I’ll answer. The UN’s required-reading list finds no end, somehow. Though I’m no diplomat, I’m grateful I can pass at least as an intellectual. 

He whips out another. “And this?” 

“Skimmed, too.”

“Ah,” says Amicus, smirking. “I see why you’re not an emperor.”

I chuckle and swat his arm if I’m next to him. “I got better. An emperor’s husband.”

Then we’ll kiss just like lovers in cheesy movies. I rub his shoulders and chest with bare hands. How can I describe him without being pornographic? He’s strong and a little chubby and reassuring. Glacial. We do as the Romans do and his member is just as rock-solid as the rest of him. Every part of him is huge, is hugeness itself, his height and his shoulders and his voice. Though we try, something like him cannot be contained in so small a space as mine. We get several disgusted noise complaints from the neighbors.

*

His confidence-facade never wavers, as we’ve both spent enough time alone in the palace to get used to solitude, but still it kills me sometimes to have him visit without showing him the city. Italy has come to be home for me, albeit temporary; when he’s away, all I can see are things he’d be amazed by. Cabs and bugs and tex-mex. He’d think Area 51 were a preschool. 

For his part, Amicus claims he feels the same: human-food joints are popping up all over the city, the palace has gotten new furniture, Alex has finally gotten back to Omorfa to stay. He shows up each time with a scroll covered in things he wants to update me on, unbundling it in the florescent light of my crappy apartment kitchen, and so many of them are pointless and menial that I just lay my head on his chest and tell him to go on in detail so I can feel his voice rumble in my skull. Only then can I be wholly surrounded by him. 

On nights like that, I start to be okay with it. When he’s here, fur against my face, why would I ever want to take him outside? 

*

“I lived in the imperial family’s palace, across a lake from the moon’s capital city…”

The palace was always bare of conversation; ironically, so is downtown. Though full of people—the street vendors, the tourists with cartoon hearts in place of eyes who huddle tightly together, the locals just trying to get from point A to point B without interruption—no one pays much attention to the standard 23-year-old white guy. I mean, after all, it’s fucking Rome. All the diplomatic work reminds me of Amicus. So often I wonder if his boardroom meetings on Adastra are as unsatisfying, if he feels unheard despite his importance like I do. Somehow, we aren’t so different.

While he waits at the apartment, I make a presentation at some local university. It’s a lecture hall out of a movie—hundreds of grad students watch me in silence in a massive amphitheater, shoulder-to-shoulder. I’m flanked by a UN representative and some country’s secretary of state. (The more I talk about the Galaxias, the less I’m concerned with borders. Discovering our whole world is this puny, this insignificant, even the idea of separating ourselves into nations and states becomes ridiculous. To everyone else in the universe, we’re just humans.)

I don’t hate all the public-speaking stuff as much as I thought I would. It makes me think of him, of course, and all those grandiose speeches he makes in front of crowds, but I’m no Emperor Amicus. Really, I’m just your standard history nerd with a laser-pointer. (Who put me in charge, I so often wonder. Why am I not just a whistleblower, someone whose face can be plastered to a whole movement of government secrecy and internet-message-board pseudoscience? All I had was a story; when I arrived, the EU already had more theoretical knowledge than me. And I’m the one who has to make powerpoints?)

I open the lecture up to questions in my last half-hour. This is the hardest part—they always ask about Amicus, and I always mince my words. I’m sure the front three rows can see me blush deep, tomato-red. 

A forty-something in wire-rim glasses raises two fingers and I point to him. “Can you tell me more about the day-to-day life you lived on Planet Nine?” he asks. On Earth, scholars refuse to call Adastra by its name. “I’m curious about the culture you encountered, if you remember, or at least the interactions you had.” 

I’ve already told him everything I know, but I bite anyway. “Well, there isn’t much to tell, honestly. Almost everything I did was indoors, or at least on the palace grounds, and from what I gathered daily life is very, very different outside those walls.” I wait a second to let my translator catch up. He turns to look at me, expectant. Every person in the room is scribbling my words on their notepads furiously. “I can’t really tell you much except it resembled conventional ideas about ancient Rome. We ate bread and cheese and olives and wine and wore capes and underwear.” I shrug. “It was pretty luxurious. I’m definitely not the best resource.”

“But you’re the only resource. And about your role in the palace,” he continues. “you were hired—” he checks his notes— “as a servant to the king?”

I try my best not to choke. How does one casually explain that it was kidnapping, or that the intention was less servanthood and more status-symbol-slash-sex-slave? Or worse, that I _fell_ for it? “Something like that. Emperor Amicus picked me up before he took the throne. My first few months on Planet Nine were during his campaign.”

“But you didn’t join him on the campaign trail?”

“Nope,” I answer honestly. It makes me a little self-conscious. I sound so boring, so useless. “He did all the leg work. For the most part, I stayed indoors.” I think of Amicus right now, reclining on my couch, waiting for me to get home. How many of these students would give their lives away to know he were in the same city as them? How many questions do they dream about asking, experiments they have wet dreams about running on the one I call husband? I’m tired; I just want to get home and rub his belly. We’ll eat pizza, drink wine, dance in slow drunk circles to the oldies station like some lux Roman senator in reverie. 

And that’s love indoors: I have every scientist in the world hanging on my every word, the whole city of Rome at my fingertips, but the only road I care to take is right back to my crappy studio apartment. Right back to my wolf.

*

I bring home a bottle of good wine and a whole pizza. The first thing to come off are my shoes, then my jacket, then my tie. I’m sick of being official.

Amicus is asleep on my bed, knocked out, and I tease the idea of waking him up before I decide, instead, to just lie down and look up at the ceiling with him. He snores softly next to me. I try to look past the ceiling, to enter whatever place he goes to dream, but hearing the tide of his breath is, for the moment, enough.


End file.
